The saga of Star Citizen

Starr Keshet, 13th December 2012

Star Citizen is an upcoming PC space simulator developed by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame. The F2p game is set in the year 2942 where players inhabit a slowly decaying cosmic empire.

There are multiple ways to earn citizenship, including becoming a merchant or performing various civic duties. However, the route many PC gamers will undoubtedly take is signing up with Squadron 42 and serving in the Star Citizen military.

As we've previously discussed on TG Daily, the detail on this game is incredible and the visuals are built on top of a modded version of CryEngine 3. Playing as Squadron 42 warriors will allow players to fight hostile extraterrestrials or trade with friendly aliens.

According to Chris Roberts, the game will be as cutting-edge as possible, which is why it won't be available for consoles.

"As time went on, the old console publishing path started to feel very yesterday, and I was thinking, 'Do I really want to spend three years working on a next-gen console game that would ship just after the new consoles are out to a very small customer base," Roberts told GamesIndustry.biz. "It would get a month's worth of play and they'd be on to the next thing. So I cut out the first step.”

Roberts also discussed what eager KickStarter backers can expect during the two year wait for the game.

"We'll be giving them builds and portions of it much sooner than that, and they'll be getting multiple updates every single week. I want to make the journey, for everyone that backed it, as fun as the actual game," he explained.

"I want them to get to the point where they feel they got their money's worth before the finished game is actually released. That's a big priority for me. We're going to treat our backers essentially as we would a publisher, where you work towards milestones and then have a show-and-tell on the new features and the latest build. The community has financed the game, so it should get that level of respect.”

In addition, Roberts commented on the graphics behind Star Citizen, which are shaping up to be a "cutting-edge" visual experience.

“You don't have to spend any of your processing time or GPU time on rendering the environment, because the environment is mostly empty - it's Space. There'll be a few nebulae up in the background, but that's nothing compared to what they have to do in, say, Crysis 3, where they're rendering New York with vegetation," he said.

"Instead, we can focus an extreme amount of detail on specific objects, so the ship and the character flying it. They have such huge poly counts because I don't need to worry about rendering a whole city collapsing. Each blade of grass doesn't have a lot of polys, but there are thousands of them."

Star Citizen recently managed to raise $2,134,374 on Kickstarter, with a grand total of 34,397 backers. Two years is certainly a long time to wait for a game, but in this particular case, definitely well worth it.